Bad webmonkey, no Mt. Dew!

Given the possibility that the title could be taken as a pejorative, I should get a few things out of the way:

• Web programming can be "real" programming. It is a cross-disciplinary task and there are so many subtleties and complexities that web programmers ought to be taken seriously.
• Web programmers don't have the luxury of having most of their mistakes take place off camera the way some of us do.
• In addition to the complexities of the programming environment they get to deal with UI (or UE, if you prefer) all the time. Poor things.

But ... those same bullet points explain why they get bagged on: their mistakes are highly visible, annoying, and they generally turn out to be something that some segment of the users consider to be "obvious". As in "How could anyone with half-a-brain not know that?!?" kind of obvious to some part of their audience. And they don't generally hear from the cohort who shares their ignorance.

The answer to that exasperated query is that it takes time, effort, and experience to become good at cross-disciplinary stuff. You need to know a few things in great depth, a larger number of things to moderate depth, and a little bit about a huge number of things. That takes time.

Now, twenty years ago web programming had a reputation for low barrier to entry. Is that still true? I don't hang around the right places to know what people say about it these days. But combining low barriers to entry with pretty high requirements for preparation is a recipe for disaster.

So, "What brought this on?" I hear you saying.

Well, not really because you're on the other side of the internet from me, I haven't hacked your microphone, and it's not clear that anyone actually reads this thing with any regularity. But I have a good imagination, so I hear you saying it anyway.

Setting my security questions and responses for a web site. Unfortunately,

• The street I lived on when I was ten years old had a two word name (not counting "Road": its name was a phrase), which the person who programmed the form apparently thinks is a thing that doesn't happen.
• I got my first job in a city in the US southwest named after a saint. In Spanish. So it, too, is two words. Again, the programmer apparently doesn't believe in such nonsense.

Now, young programmers in my end of the business are pointed at a few documents early on to give them a starting familiarity with some of the more trap-laden parts of our work. Things like What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic and What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (PDF link) . I would have thought that Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses would be reasonably obvious candidates for the same role among web programmers. In fact these kinds of document make up a little genre of their own, and it's one worth taking a little time to explore. I promise you'll find one or two that you're guilty of.

Rather than hurling imprecations at web programmers in general, or even at the miscreant in this particular episode I'll just ask anyone going into web programming to find some resources for how to think about these things. Please.

More on bureaucratic language

My wife and I got the Janssen (AKA Johnson&Johnson) vacinne today. No significant side effects at this point.

But I want to talk about the paperwork. The fact-sheet that I was required to acknowledge receipt of included language like

There is no U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved vaccine to prevent COVID-19.

The Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine is an unapproved vaccine that may prevent COVID-19.

And several more variations on the same theme.

Now, on one hand the point is clear: the FDA has not completed its (lengthy) approval process and has just given permission to use these things because the pandemic represents an emergency situation.

But on the other hand the expectation is that hundreds of millions of Americans (not to mention billions of people in other parts of the world) will receive one or the other of these vaccines. So what is the difference between the current situation and approval? Nothing outside the structure of the bureaucracy's regulatory structure.

Not that I think there is anything malicious or even dishonest about this business. It's just that organizations create their own cognitive structure and then live in them even when they lose fidelity with the real world. In other cases that can be a problem.